Northern Spy

by Flynn Berry

  He’s in danger, too, if Marian has told the government about him. He will want to know about his own exposure. How many years he has been marked by them, when he’d thought he was anonymous.

  Seamus looks at me, waiting, and every inch of my body stands to attention. Finn’s face blooms in front of me. If I nod, he will let me go home to my son.

  “She’s lying,” I hear myself say, even as my whole being rushes toward Finn. “Marian’s not a tout. She’s just saying what she thinks you want to hear so you’ll let me go.”

  Marian says, “I’m not lying. It’s over, Seamus. Let her leave.”

  Seamus jogs his foot up and down on his knee, then purses his mouth in thought. “No,” he says, finally. “Tessa’s guilty, too, look how scared she is.”

  Marian crosses the room and kneels in front of his chair. She’s going to beg him, I think, but instead she rises up and drives the metal point of her hair clasp into the side of his neck.

  Blood sprays the air. Seamus lets out a sound, like a bark. As he falls forward, Marian catches his weight and lowers him to the floor. A glossy curve of blood spills toward me. It reaches the mattress and then starts to climb, wicked up by the sky-blue sheets.

  I look at Seamus’s face above the shining mess of his throat. I look at the slack set of his mouth, the soft pouches under his eyes, his pale, sandy lashes. A few minutes ago, he was blinking, breathing, talking.

  Marian is washed in his blood. It’s smeared on her chest, her throat, her hands. The ends of her hair are dripping. She must have used a lot of force, to push the clasp in that far. I look at her and my head swims. Her stained chest rises with her breath.

  Marian kneels beside him and slides her hand under his back. She pats down his legs, then rocks onto her heels. “Oh, god,” she says, which means there’s no gun. The guards will be back soon. They will open the door and see the wet floor and wall.

  “What have you done?” I ask.

  “They had plastic sheeting in the hall,” she says. “He was going to kill us.”

  I notice dots of blood on my own shirt, and my mind crawls. “Take off your shoes,” says Marian, unlacing her own. I shake my head. “Come on, Tessa. We need to go.”

  A roll of plastic sheeting is outside our door. She was right. Seamus was going to kill us, and then wrap our bodies in it.

  No other doors lead off the hall. We stand together at the top of the stairs, listening. The house is quiet. The guards might be smoking outside. I follow Marian down the stairs, holding my breath, unable to hear how much noise we’re making over the pounding in my ears.

  Marian leans forward to look toward the kitchen, then waves me ahead of her. The front door is maybe ten feet away. We’re almost there, I’m reaching out my hand for the doorknob, when I hear a floorboard creak. The bouncer is standing motionless in the dining room. His eyes widen when he sees us, and the blood splashed on our clothes.

  The two of us freeze. We draw together, standing side by side, near enough for me to feel the warmth from her clothes and hair. A taut wire runs between us, pulling with every twitch of movement. The side of my body prickles, the hairs standing on my arm.

  “Aidan,” says a man’s voice, and then the other guard rounds the corner into the room. “Oh, fuck.”

  “Listen to me,” says Marian softly. “There’s a brick of Semtex in the closet. Unwrap the foil and place it on top of the boiler before you leave. The explosion will look like an accident.”

  The air between us hums. I don’t know what she’s doing, why she thinks they’ll obey her. Marian says, “You’re going to say that Seamus and both of us were inside during the explosion. You’re going to say that we died.”

  Slowly the bouncer reaches behind his back for his gun. He holds it at his side, looking back and forth between us. There is a row of icicles hanging from the window ledge. I notice them, and a lemon scent in the air.

  Nothing she can say will convince him. The waste of it stuns me, when we’ve come this close. Finn. Finn, Finn, Finn. I won’t get to find out what he will be like. He’ll be lovely, I know that. A sound breaks from my throat.

  “No one will thank you for killing us,” she says. “When this is over, people like us won’t be rewarded.”

  Sunlight slides down the icicles. Aidan steps toward us, and I feel Marian flinch. He says, “Run.”

  40

  Marian is ahead of me, her hair swinging from side to side, her arms pumping as we race through the trees. She’s fast, even with the snow. Pine trees jerk past us, and it feels less like running than downhill skiing. With every step, the cold stabs through my feet.

  The wet soles of Marian’s socks flash up toward me, kicking back as she sprints. I look past her to where the trees thin, and then we’re out of the woods and racing up a slope with the farmhouse behind us in the valley. My lungs burn. If the guards are outside, they will be able to see us, exposed on the hill.

  We’re halfway to the ridge when a sound makes me pitch forward. I land on my hands in the snow and look back as a fireball bursts through the farmhouse walls and boils into the sky. Debris and glass rain down on the clearing. The flames keep expanding, mushrooming outward, then they subside and smoke pours from the blackened ruin.

  “Come on,” says Marian, and I scramble to my feet. We reach the top of the slope and throw ourselves down the other side, spinning our arms for balance.

  At the bottom of the hill, we turn onto the narrow track. No one has plowed it yet. There are tire marks in the snow, but they might be Seamus’s from when he drove to the farmhouse this morning. “There’s a main road ahead,” says Marian.

  “How far?”

  “Two miles.”

  My feet have turned numb. I can’t feel them at all. It’s like running on stumps, like I have two peg legs.

  Overhead, the clouds are opaled yellow and purple by a hidden winter sun. Every surface is banked in snow, and the trees are lacy with ice. The temperature is, I would guess, slightly below freezing. We need to worry about frostbite, and hypothermia. We pass a derelict farm building, a concrete shed with a rusted tin roof. I want to crawl inside, out of the cold and the wind, but Marian is pelting down the track.

  When she turns around to check for me, her chin and nose are scalded red from the cold. We don’t seem to have covered any ground at all. The track stretches ahead of us, with white hills on either side, and no houses or telephone wires in sight.

  “Are you sure this is the right direction?”

  “Yes.”

  A sound takes shape in the distance, and we both stop. A car is coming toward us. We’re in South Armagh, in an area controlled by the IRA. This person might help us, or drive us straight back to where we came from. We can’t have made it this far only for them to round us up.

  “Do you think they’re driving to the farmhouse?” I ask.

  “I don’t know,” says Marian. Our voices sound slurred.

  “What else is in that direction?”

  “Not much.”

  It could be a local member, coming to check on our interrogation, or to speak with Seamus. We stand in the center of the track, shaking from the cold, as the car engine grows louder.

  Marian grabs me by the arm and pulls me off the road to crouch behind the shrubs. “Keep your head down,” she says, huddling around me. The car roars past, and when I lift my head, it’s disappearing down the track.

  Neither of us can run as fast anymore, the cold is making us clumsy. In my head, I talk to Finn. I tell him I’m on my way.

  The crossing finally appears ahead of us. On the main road are a handful of houses, identical brick bungalows. The first one is only ten meters away. I keep my gaze on it, and the house judders with my foot falls.

  “How are we meant to decide?” I ask, and Marian shakes her head. We don’t have much of a choice anymore, in this temperature. I wa
nt to call out to her, but then she’s knocking on the door.

  “It’s empty,” she says.

  All of these houses might be vacant. With the degree of conflict here, everyone might have moved away. The road feels deserted. A stillness hangs over it, like we’re the only ones for miles. No one answers at the next house, either. We keep walking, though I’m having trouble moving my legs.

  A dog barks. The hairs lift at the base of my neck. The dog barks again, a hoarse, rasping sound, from a small dog. I walk toward the sound, and there is the dog, a fox terrier. My knees start to tremble. The dog tilts his head at me.

  An elderly woman in a coat and woolly hat comes around the side of the house, holding a snow shovel, which she drops when she sees me. Her hand flies to her mouth. I stand at the edge of her property, with bare, scratched feet, my clothes stained with blood.

  “Can you help me?” I ask.

  She’s about to speak when Marian appears beside me. The stains on her jumper have darkened to almost black. The woman’s eyes flick between us, and she says, “Jesus, oh, Jesus, come in, come inside.”

  We follow her into the bungalow and she locks the door. She takes two blankets down from a press and wraps them around us. “I’ll ring for an ambulance.”

  “No,” says Marian, “please don’t.”

  No one from here can see us. We can’t trust the paramedics, even, not to mention us to the local IRA.

  “How far are we from the border?” asks Marian.

  “Twelve miles.”

  “Can you drive us across it?”

  In her car, the woman turns the heat on to full blast. I curl my numb fingers against the heating vents, and pain bursts through them as the nerves come back to life. She reverses the car, and races down the road. “I’m Evelyn,” she says. I try to answer, but my teeth are chattering so much my name barely comes out. Evelyn looks in her rearview mirror. “Were you followed?”

  Marian shakes her head, and we speed toward the border. We’re not safe yet, every car that passes could be an IRA member. They’d kill Evelyn, too, for helping us.

  “Can I please use your phone?” I ask, and she hands me her bag. I dial Fenton’s number. “Do you have my son?”

  “No,” he says, and everything stops. My chest is being crushed. “Finn’s with your mam,” he says, and I burst into tears.

  “Where?”

  “A house in Ballynahinch, under protection. Where are you, Tessa?” he asks, but I’m crying too hard to speak, so I pass the phone to Marian. She says, “Hi, detective. We’re on the A29 near Crossmaglen, heading south. We don’t have papers to cross the border, can you call ahead for us?”

  He asks her something, and she says, matter-of-factly, “We were abducted. They were going to kill us for informing but we escaped.”

  In the driver’s seat, Evelyn looks admirably unfazed by this information. She says, “There’s a hospital across the border in Monaghan.”

  Marian relays this to the detective. “He’ll meet us there. The police will bring mam and Finn,” she says, and I close my eyes.

  * * *

  —

  At the hospital, two nurses are waiting for us outside A&E. They wrap us in foil blankets and lead us into treatment rooms. “How long were you outdoors?” asks my nurse.

  “Maybe half an hour, or forty minutes.”

  “And did you have shoes on for any part of that?”

  “No.”

  The nurse carries a tub of warm water over from the sink. I watch her roll my jeans away from my feet, without feeling anything. She gives me some pain medication. “This will hurt,” she says, and eases my feet into the water.

  Under the surface, my feet are white. I look down at them, curious, and then the burning starts as they warm, the skin turning red, then purple. “That’s good,” says the nurse, “that’s what we want to see. Are you okay?”

  I nod, fighting to hold them in the water. She takes my blood pressure and temperature, checks my fingers and ears for frostbite. It feels nice to be handled. She doesn’t mention the blood on my clothes, or ask whose it is. Eventually she lifts my feet from the water and wraps them in gauze bandages. “They’re going to blister,” she says. “But on the bright side, you’re going to keep all your toes.”

  She’s fastening one of the bandages when I hear a baby’s cry in the hall. “Sorry. Sorry, one minute.”

  I hobble into the corridor. Finn is sailing toward me, grumbling, carried in my mam’s arms, with Fenton and two uniformed constables behind them. I hurry forward, clumsy on my feet, my heart surging with wild joy, and then Finn turns his head and sees me. “Mama,” he says, pointing at me, and throws himself forward into my arms.

  Marian comes out of her room, too, and claps her hands when she sees the baby. The detective looks from me to her. He says, “I don’t know where to begin.”

  41

  Idon’t want to fall entirely asleep. I’m too comfortable, this is too pleasant, the soft hospital bed, the pillows.

  I lie on my side, with a pillow under my head and another between my knees. They didn’t cut off my clothes earlier. I don’t know why I’d expected they would. The nurse asked me to change into a hospital gown. Afterward, I watched her put my stained clothes into a clear polystyrene bag and hand it to a constable. She scraped under my fingernails, and gave him those samples, too.

  We’re in a new hospital, a teaching hospital, with modern equipment. A doctor performed a trauma exam, pressing each of my vertebrae for tenderness. She checked me for bruises or abrasions, folding back one part of the hospital gown at a time so the rest of my body was covered. When she finished the exam, she said, “Your blood pressure and heart rate are a little low, most likely from dehydration. We’ll start an IV drip with fluids and electrolytes.”

  Her tone was brisk and practical, without a shred of curiosity or morbid interest. I was so grateful to her for speaking to me normally.

  An orderly brought me dinner on a tray, with ice water and a chocolate pudding cup. “Are we getting special treatment?” I asked, and he laughed. He thought I was being sarcastic, and I said, “No, it’s really good.”

  He said, “Imagine how you’ll feel about food that’s actually good.”

  For the first time in ages, I don’t have to do anything. My family is safe. A few hours ago, a constable drove my mam and Finn to a nearby hotel for the night. My hair is cool against the pillow, and something in the room smells like eucalyptus. I stay in this hinterland, drifting.

  * * *

  —

  Fenton returns in the morning. He explains that Marian and I will be interviewed separately, for preservation of evidence.

  “Were you close to finding us?” I ask.

  He hesitates, then says, “No.”

  “Did you coordinate with MI5?”

  “They said they had no record of you or your sister ever working for them.”

  I stare at him. “Have you told Marian?”

  He nods. Her pledge account was emptied. She called the Swiss bank and was told her account had been cleared two days ago, the day of our abduction.

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Let’s start at the beginning,” he says. “Why were you under suspicion?”

  “It wasn’t anything we’d done. An operation to assassinate the justice minister went wrong, and someone blamed it on us. Someone set us up.”

  “Who else knows that you’ve been informing?”

  “Our mam,” I answer, “and our handler, Eamonn.”

  The detective has me describe my meetings with Eamonn. He asks for a physical description of Eamonn, and an account of everything he ever asked me to do. He says, “Did you ever meet with anyone else from MI5?”

  “No. Why didn’t Eamonn help us?” Even if, somehow, Marian’s tracker had failed, Eamonn knew the location of the f
armhouse. He could have had it checked.

  Fenton shakes his head. “It’s hard to say. MI5 is not exactly transparent.”

  “If you had to guess—”

  “They were protecting someone else. Someone else did sabotage the assassination, and was advised by MI5 to blame it on you.”

  “But we were working for them.”

  “They might have considered the other informer more valuable. Higher up the chain.”

  “So they would have let us die?”

  “It’s happened before,” he says. “Quite—quite a bit more often than you’d think.”

  “Who were they protecting? Who accused us?”

  “We might never know.”

  It had been a witchcraft trial, really. During those, your only protection was to accuse someone else. Four hundred years later, the mechanism worked exactly the same.

  The security service had decided to let us die, for the greater good. I’d never once considered that as one of the ways they might use us. The last time on the beach, when we celebrated, Eamonn had nearly kissed me. I’d been so stupid, I hadn’t realized that was an operational strategy.

  The detective asks me what happened at the farmhouse. It feels like describing events from years ago, even though my feet are still covered in blisters from running through the snow. I describe Seamus coming into the room, then stop. He already knows the interrogation ended in violence, he has seen our clothes.

  “It was self-defense. Seamus was going to kill us.”

  He says, “The prosecutor’s office has granted both you and Marian immunity from prosecution of any crimes, in exchange for your evidence.”

  I tell him that Marian stabbed Seamus in his throat with her hair clasp, and he listens with an impassive expression.

  “Why did the guards let you go?”

  “Self-preservation, probably,” I say. “They hadn’t stopped us from killing Seamus, the IRA would have punished them. They must have been relieved to be given a way out.”